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Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

scienceblog.com

101–110 of 176 posts

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#101
post #87

There's a fascinating tension with anti-aging drugs, which is that your preference would obviously be to take them as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway. But taking experimental drugs while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake o…

Taurine and Vitamin E are readily available and seem prudent. For melatonin, tryptophan plus niacin would maximize the serotonin pathway (note this is dangerous when used with SSRIs). How many of these are easily available? I had no idea that royal jelly is sold as a supplement.

Of the prescription options, estradiol is probably the most common and easily available, between hormonal birth control and HRT.

It is also likely the most easy to study, as we have 60-70 years of usage that is not correlated with prevalence of other diseases that might skew life expectancy (like metformin etc.), and quite high-quality medical records by virtue of it being vended on a prescription basis.

Despite this, there is not really any clear evidence that it increases life expectancy.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#102
post #57

Ascorbic is not a correct name of a compound. Should be 'ascorbic acid' or Vitamin C. Such sloppiness cast doubt on accuracy of the whole review.

Read a little further... it's specifically called ascorbic acid and vitamin C.

He probably just wanted to save space within the table.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#103
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to poke at the military budget as wasteful, but human history has shown that military expenditure is at a minimum, necessary. The same cannot be said of most preferred spending avenues for the cause of the day.

I'm reading that the US spends about $893 billion[1] on national defence and about $5.3 trillion on health care in 2024, with spending on track for roughly $5.6 trillion in 2025 [2][3]. These figures don't match my intuition... --- [1] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1242... [2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2025.0... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collec…

Are you comparing total health care spending to direct government spending on the military?

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#104
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also this: > The best reason to take multiple life extension supplements is to hedge our bets, because we really don’t know which of them are effective in humans. And earlier: > Personally, I take large doses of rapamycin 2 days a week, 8 weeks per year. For personalized recommendations, you can consult your favorite life extension doc.

How to hedge a bet 101: 1.you bet on risky stuff using something of value (money, health,...) 2.since you're unsure whether your bet will pay off, you bet some more on some other risky stuff, just to be sure. BTW if you were wondering, of course all those proposed weird life-prolonging treatments are totally devoid of side-effects.

Never put 100% of your savings into a single slot machine. Take 10% of your savings to 10 different casinos and distribute them to 10 slot machines in each, in order to hedge.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#105

This is useless. It takes zero account of genetic variability. I can tell you several of those things on that list that will decrease my lifespan. If you care about your personal lifespan, you should care about your personal genetics and your personal heritage. This was the same stupidity we saw with the blue zones. They didn’t think for a minute that these people lived for a long time because they were eating the fo…

Actually, those people lived for a long time largely because they had poor or compromised records of birth and death dates.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#106
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also this: > The best reason to take multiple life extension supplements is to hedge our bets, because we really don’t know which of them are effective in humans. And earlier: > Personally, I take large doses of rapamycin 2 days a week, 8 weeks per year. For personalized recommendations, you can consult your favorite life extension doc.

I recently saw a patient with overwhelming MRSA sepsis with multiple foci of infection including epidural abscess (around the spinal cord), and meningitis. This person was taking rapamycin presumably for "life extension" purposes. Almost certainly the immunosuppression from the rapamycin made the infection much worse. I'd be very wary of taking an immunosuppressive drug as an otherwise healthy person for theoretical…

What was the dose and frequency? I bet it was rather high. Or do you really think that 1 mg once per week will suppress the immune system?

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#107
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While autophagy does correlate with fasting and some studies link it to health markers, it should be noted that it usually takes at least 18 hours of continued fasting to even start and only goes into full swing after 48 to 72 hours. It is also an extreme cell response that is associated with high levels of cellular stress, which might have understudied long term detrimental effects. A simple calorie reduction either…

I have personally reduced my a1c from 6.2 to 5.3, mostly by fasting for 36 hours per week. I already cut refined sugar out of my diet several years ago.

> reduced my a1c

And therefore ?

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#108
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These drugs have been around since 2005. Exenatide was approved by the FDA for use in 2005. We've had plenty of time. Only their approval for weight loss is new

Exenatide was a very small population base. The approval for weight loss means this drug is being taken by millions of more people which leads to a larger sample size. The larger the sample size the more negative effects will be revealed. I’ll just leave this here for the future m. I have no evidence other than common sense that it is ridiculous to think that injecting a hormone randomly in your body does not lead to…

The majority is gaining literal years of healthy lifespan. It would take a lot of damage to even approach this gain for the average person. Like we used to do very invasive and impactful gastric surgery to try and get weight loss and nobody batted an eye, no?

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#109
It is spreading FUD wrt quercetin. It states there is just applicable one mammalian study which it doesn't even cite. In reality there have been multiple studies in humans showing no harm from a reasonable dose.

Re: Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

#110
post #84
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we really manage to crack the code on aging, How certain are we that it's merely something to be delayed? Apparent age is at least somewhat reversible via lifestyle factors e.g. diet/exercise/sobriety.

In fact that's Aubrey de Grey's approach: rather than trying to figure out all the complicated processes involved in causing the damage in the first place, so you can slow them down, just directly fix the damage afterwards. There's been quite a bit of research on this.

de Grey is not using sobriety as a lifestyle factor to reverse anything I'm pretty sure.
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